Robert Fulford: On the hippies of Yorkville yore

For a few brief years near the middle of the past century, the rebellious young of North America had their own exciting story to tell — and they loved to tell it.

They claimed to be a new force, with original ideas. They were against money, materialism, boring jobs, conformity. They announced, in wondrously confident voices, that they were transforming the deadly society around them into a vibrant, enriching new civilization. They were the prophets of a do-your-own-thing hedonism that would combine peace, love, drugs and communal values into a fresh way of life.

They were called “hippies,” a word that in the 1960s terrified churches, police, local governments and above all parents. They took pride in their outlandish garments. I remember once talking with two hippies as they discussed heavy-duty leather jackets available at a Toronto store called Hercules Sales; their tone of proud acquisitiveness differed not at all from that of rich matrons discussing Dior.

The hippies believed (and convinced many a gullible journalist to believe) that they were the vanguard of a revolution, or at least a social movement. In retrospect, however, it’s clear they were creating an imitation of social change. They were living out a fanciful version of a liberated life.

Certainly that’s what comes across vividly in the latest account of that period, Stuart Henderson’s Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s (University of Toronto Press), a cultural historian’s often shrewd analysis of an exceptional moment in our past.

Hippies certainly affected the world that followed them. Sexual morals were loosened, ordinary clothing became less formalized, language suddenly grew saltier — and the loud-mouthed, self-assertive hippies were one reason for those changes. The music they loved changed mainstream culture. (Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Young all started out in the coffee houses of Yorkville.)

But if there was a social purpose behind what the hippies did, all the demonstrating and sitting-in and general hell-raising, few of them understood what it was. As a journalist, about 10 years older than a hippie, I could never figure out whether they thought they were revolutionaries, performers in some lesser wing of show business or a branch of the tourism industry. They were a cultural phenomenon but what they did owed as much to the arts of public relations as to the music of The Beatles and Jefferson Airplane.

If you talked to them for a while they soon revealed that what they most cared about, and most wanted to talk about, was their unhappiness with their parents, tyrants who refused to let them do what they wanted to do. At its core the hippie movement was domestic conflict projected onto a continent-wide screen.

Henderson, who was born in 1977, grew up feeling vaguely cheated because he had missed out on the enchantment of the 1960s. He began to study the hippies who flourished for a while in the Yorkville district of Toronto. Eventually he wrote a PhD dissertation at Queen’s University and turned it into Making the Scene.

Among the many sources Henderson uses, the most interesting is David DePoe. He appeared on the cover of the Sept. 23, 1967, issue of the Star Weekly along with the words “SUPER HIPPIE” in bold headline type. With that story the Star Weekly, one of the big Canadian magazines of the day, made DePoe into a national figure, the symbol of the counterculture.

Apparently his life and ambitions embodied all that was exciting, challenging and outrageous about the youth movement. He was a rebel who organized the young in their struggle against the smug satisfactions of middle-class life. He and his peers had determined to make a new life for themselves, radically different from the lives of their parents.

The article and DePoe’s response to it are a pivotal moment in Making the Scene. The editors probably expected DePoe to enjoy all the attention. After all, they were making him a star. Instead, he was mortified. He was singled out as a leader in a milieu that disdained leadership, he was described as glamorous when he and his friends hated the idea of glamour and he gave the impression that he knew best what was happening in the hippie world.

A few years ago, when interviewed by Henderson, DePoe said, “Oh man, I was so embarrassed by that. That isn’t how I saw myself or felt about myself.” After the article came out he was treated like a rock star. He visited a high school “and I walked down the hallway and all these girls started to scream! And they all had my picture from Star Weekly in their lockers.”

To his friends DePoe must have looked like a fool. What made it both ironic and complicated was that he was a skilled publicity hound. “I was media savvy,” as he recalled. “I used the media consciously.” Having grown up as the son of Norman DePoe, the senior Ottawa reporter for CBC television, he could alert the CBC news desk to planned demonstrations the hippies were staging, he had a significant ally in Michael Valpy of the Globe, he knew the guy to call on the old Toronto Telegram and his college roommate, Bill Cameron, was a talented magazine writer. As it turned out it was Cameron who wrote the offensive profile.

Henderson treats DePoe and all his other Yorkville characters with respect and, unlike many writers on the 1960s, tells us whenever possible where they ended up (DePoe is a retired elementary school teacher). But Henderson doesn’t take any of them as seriously as they took themselves and he doesn’t bother to disguise the fact that their movement was grounded in self-delusion.

It lasted, at most, only half a dozen years. Soon the young rebels were moving toward careers not all that different from those their parents wanted for them. By 1970 it was over and Yorkville Avenue, which they had claimed as their private urban space, was beginning its conversion to a centre for high-end stores, restaurants and condos.

Wordsworth reminds us eloquently that nothing lasts — “The rainbow comes and goes,” as he put it. But a reading of this particular rainbow’s history raises sympathy for the hippies. It seems unfair that they had to learn this terrible truth so early in their lives.